There's always the Recycler

In The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" this week, Tad Friend reports on what ensued when the L.A. staff of the National Lampoon website -- Steve Brykman, Joe Oesterle, Sean Crespo, and Mason Brown -- got laid off and tried to peddle their services on eBay. They suggested a sliding rate -- “$14,000/week or $50,000/month or $250,000/six months or $400,000 per year” -- but the market valued them at considerably, uh, less.

The ten-day auction began on November 18th, and by the end of the day the bidding had soared from fifty dollars to four hundred and five. Then the offers slowed, and the complaints and tire-kicking niggles began. First, a National Lampoon executive demanded that the Lampoon logo be removed from the listing. Next, a woman from England inquired if Brykman alone could write a “5 minute funny speech” for her husband to deliver at her daughter’s bat mitzvah—something “relatively memorable,” but only at his “best price.”

Then Larry Herbst, a television producer from Pasadena, e-mailed to say, “I understand the writers are being sold as a set. Any chance of parting them out? I already have a Jew and a guy who’s good with hubris (all right, they’re the same guy) but would have use for the old money guy, and possibly the bachelor, depending on his accessories.” But Herbst ultimately decided not to bid. Via e-mail, he said, “Another concern I had was . . . what if they’re not really funny?”

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In the final six seconds of the auction, Tom Campbell swooped in with a winning bid of five hundred and sixty dollars. Campbell is an Orange County entrepreneur who markets an online-auction technology called eSnipe, which makes winning bids in the final six seconds, and he wanted the writers to develop an ad for it. Brykman pitched him a concept right off the bat: Two guys sit at computers side by side as an online auction ticks down. One is frazzled, his finger hovering anxiously over the send key; the other is smugly sipping coffee, knowing that eSnipe is on his side. “It’s a pretty good idea,” Campbell says. “But don’t tell them that yet—I want to get my full man-hours out of these guys.”